Majority Of All Digital Consumers Now Use Multiple Devices, Says Millennial Media

The increase in cross-device users provides more opportunities for marketers to target customers in different spaces.

By Daniel ParisiJul 2, 2015 2:57PM

Over the past few years, a huge majority of consumers have evolved from being PC only to spreading their online time among multiple devices. Today, a vast majority of consumers are cross-device users regardless of age demographic and mobile device usage is on the rise, reports Millennial Media.

The mobile ad marketplace’s report goes in depth about the many ways that consumers across all age groups use their devices and which ones are the most popular. The results are not completely surprising but they do have some positive implications.

About 83 percent of digital consumers aged 35-54 (referred to in the study as “Gen X”) use multiple devices every day, while only 20 percent are mobile only and a measly 5 percent use PC only. The other two age demographics looked at (18-34, “Millennials, and 55+, “Baby Boomers”) were similarly spread out with 75 percent of Millennials and 66 percent of Boomers being cross-device users.

Across all demographics except Boomers, where the PC is still the most popular device to connect to the web with, people overwhelmingly spend most of their online time on their mobile devices. And while that increase in mobile usage means more opportunities for mobile advertising, actual online shopping is still split right down the middle between mobile and PC.

The rise of mobile device usage is no surprise to industry professionals, but the important part of understanding the current digital marketing landscape is not just to learn how to cater to mobile users, but to understand the relationship between the multiple devices a customer uses and the relationship between their online experience as well as their offline.

Mobile is certainly conducive to the latter. Getting people from their computers at their desks at home into a physical store with an ad is significantly more complicated than getting someone physically walking by the store in with the same strategy. To that end, the rise of cross-device and mobile usage is an appealing statistic.

Additionally, the increase in multiple device use means more chances for retargeting and tracking users across devices. As we’ve written about before, companies like Qualia are already taking the many devices of a single customer into account, with technology designed specifically to cater to users who move from PC to tablet to mobile to a physical store. This new report suggests the need for strategies like that will only continue to grow.